UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING

(John Hyams, 2012)

He may not get the respect or acclaim he deserves, but make no mistake; with Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, John Hyams fully announces himself as one of the most interesting directors currently working in American genre cinema.
His action chops have long been evident; he shoots fight scenes with a fluid mix of shots and approaches - slo-mo, fast-cutting, classically clear compositions, handheld fluency - but those scenes are always visceral and cohesive. The fight scenes here are remarkably brutal, even gory - axes take fingers and toes, the hero John (Scott Adkins) knocks the top of a mans head clean off with a baseball bat - yet Hyams ensures that the gore is always clear in its origin and thats the dimensions of the violence are generally physically defined. One move flows into the next and from the one before, and the editing choices are dictated by the dynamics of movement, of action and reaction. This is most relevant during the last twenty minutes of the film, a quite brilliant rolling action scene depicting John infiltrating the lair of villain Luc Devereaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and battling his way, one at a time, through his army, much of it done in a single, extraordinary take. There is also a fantastically destructive fight between Adkins and Andrei Arlovsky in a sporting goods store which would be good enough to climax the majority of martial arts films.
But Hyams' sensibility is increasingly fascinating too. This film is a bizarre genre hybrid - if it surrenders to its basest action instincts in the last reel, in the first two it establishes a singular mood and worldview unlike just about anything else, ever. It has a mood of sustained dread which makes it feel nightmarish - tellingly, the first shot is from the point of view of John as he is woken from sleep - and much of the action occurs in a depopulated netherworld of hookers, strippers, mercenaries and grotesques through which John stumbles, as confused and ignorant as the audience.
It follows John as he wakes from a coma after witnessing his family murdered by Devereaux in the gruelling opening scene. As he tries to discover more about who he is and what has happened to him, a parallel story details Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren) and his attempts to recruit an army of the genetically-created "UniSols" from the other films in this franchise, to serve under the command of Devereaux, here depicted as an enigmatic Col. Kurtz figure. Meanwhile John is discovering that he may not be quite "normal", as his past acts are revealed and strangers try to murder him.
In a film like this, the acting barely matters, but Adkins has a vulnerability to him that suits his character until he remembers what he is capable of and starts to rack up a ridiculous body count. Van Damme and Lundgren have little to do but Hyams makes good use of the icon each represents.
The many ambiguities contained in the story work beautifully - the more John learns, the more complex his situation becomes - and feed into the brilliantly bitter ending, which allows for the catharsis of a final confrontation and then upends it with a vicious little coda.
It may be a little cheap and clumsily written in parts, but this film is as challenging and cynical as action cinema gets. I can't wait to see what Hyams does next.

EXPENDABLES 2

(Simon West, 2012) For something so terribly cynical, theres something heartfelt and almost naive about The Expendables films. The plot points and cliches of characterisation they use are so lame and old-fashioned that - in the age of Michael Bay and "chaos cinema" - they feel strangely authentic in their attempt to reconnect with the spirit of the action movie as it was imagined in the 1980s. This film is sleeker, slicker and far less baggy than the original, stuffing in more action scenes, more old school action stars (adding Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme and new DTV hero Scott Adkins to the original roster) but containing them within a mostly-coherent plot involving Barney (Sylvester Stallone) and his team losing a mission objective and a teammate to Van Damme's villain (actually, hilariously called Vilain) and resolving to "Track 'em, find 'em, kill 'em." somewhere in an Eastern Europe where the women wear shawls and scarves and the men model flat caps. Along the way, other mercenaries randomly pop up, having happened to be in the area (Norris' Booker gets Morricone's The Good the Bad and the Ugly as his theme) and trade groan-inducing, self-referencing one -liners (one exchange between Schwarzenegger and Willis involves both "I'll be back" and "Yippee-ki-yay") while blasting mercenary bad guys with semi-automatic weaponry, often without bothering to take cover. One cliche of '80s action cinema this film lovingly embraces is the hero standing in the open, spraying bullets at bad guys. Director West composes his shots nicely and his sequences are clear, efficient, and often exciting, if never quite inspired, and the story gives all of the heroes something to do; Jason Statham gets a church-set takedown of a team of bad guys, complete with awful one-liner and a somewhat disappointing climactic one-on-one with Adkins, while Stallone and Van Damme have their own final bout, and Lundgren, Couture and Crews mostly get the comedic material. Jet Li pops up briefly in the prologue but gets one nice action scene involving frying pans. None of them are particularly good, but then they have little to do beyond posing and cracking jokes. As such, Van Damme, Crews and Lundgren perhaps fare best, suggesting some life beyond what we see onscreen. That they are all playing action figures is largely taken for granted; this films attempts at drama are perfunctory and brief, always rushing off to the next bad gag or massive explosion. On that basis, it is sometimes fun, but also a little too generic emptily slick, and unmemorable.

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION

(John Hyams, 2009) John Hyams can really shoot action. Universal Soldier: Regeneration is filled with scenes highlighting this talent, indeed it seems at times designed as a showcase for Hyams' ability to make a familiar fight scene a visceral, almost elegantly flowing sequence. As such, it's a superior example of the truest brand of modern B-movie, the direct to DVD (DTV) action flick. It stars two DTV giants in Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, reprising their parts from Roland Emmerich's more mainstream 1999 action sci-fi blockbuster. Van Damme is Luc Devereaux and Lundgren Andrew Scott, both reanimated, augmented and near-superhuman "Universal Soldiers" who are reactivated when an Eastern European terrorist group kidnap their Presidents children and threaten to blow up what remains of Chernobyl's old reactors. The terrorist group are in cahoots with Dr Colin (Kerry Shale) who has created a new, even more powerful brand of super-soldier embodied here by MMA fighter Andrei Arlovski as a brutal, relentless, Terminator-esque presence capable of ceaseless, spectacular violence. The story exists mainly to move these characters (and the American soldier played by another MMA fighter, Mike Pyle) into position for a series of one-on-one confrontations and face-offs, but it commendably does this with virtually no flab, few poorly-written dialogue scenes, and some terrific use of the amazing Bulgarian location (an enormous, unused iron factory, convincingly standing in for Chernobyl). It also makes good use of it's principle actors; Van Damme has always had a sad-eyed melancholy to his presence, and here he spends the first hour of the film in a fog of sorrowful confusion before busting out the ultra-violence in the last act. Lundgren, on the other hand, is a more intimidating, if mischievous presence, and his character here is given an eccentric twist in his brief appearance which suits the performer. What suits him (and Van Damme) more is action, and they share an extended fight scene like somethingfrom a Godzilla film, destroying rooms and walls as they go. Arlovski has even more action, and he is a convincingly destructive physical performer, all of his hammering blows and crunching smashes captured precisely by Hyams' camera. Hyams films much of the action - including a couple of the fight exchanges and a commando attack upon the terrorists - in long, sinuously mobile camera moves, but is not above a more fashionable adherence to rapidly-cut chaos. He retains the ability to keep his material coherent, however, a prized gift in an action director. His fight scenes are often a mix of impact cuts and mid-shot one-take captures, highlighting both the athleticism of his actors and his understanding of what works best in this sort of film. His understanding of space and movement, allied to the lovely timing of his editing - there are few jarring cuts in the whole film - is what makes these scenes feel so fluid and watchable. His father - solid, occasionally inspired genre craftsman Peter Hyams - acts as his cinematographer here, and the film has a consistent, defined aesthetic throughout which is rare in the DTV field. Hyams career is definitely worth watching - on the right script, with a bigger budget, he could potentially make a great action film.